


holy trinity

by cenotaphy



Series: anamnesis 'verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comfort, Emotional Hurt, Feelings, Flashbacks, Gen, Heaven, Hell Trauma, Light Angst, Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), Michael Possessing Adam Milligan, Michael and Adam in Heaven, Other, Post-Finale, Post-Season/Series 15, Protective Adam Milligan, Protective Michael, angels and vessels being protective of each other name a better combo, i'm tagging this as romantic but i think it's fairly ambiguous, it could go either way the important thing is the DEEP AFFECTION, other characters are mentioned but this is mostly just the two of them talking to each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:42:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29351373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphy/pseuds/cenotaphy
Summary: "How come you never let Lucifer near me?" says Adam abruptly.They're walking through a heaven that's a single flat plain of snow, under a silver-pale sky. Jade ice studs the ground nearby, crags of rippling turquoise that glow electric-blue where the sunlight catches them."You were my vessel," says Michael. "We have a duty to our vessels, even as we also benefit.""Bullshit," says Adam. "I mean, I saw what Lucifer did to Sam." The memories still turn his stomach, even now."Well, nobody ever called Lucifer a paragon of responsibility," says Michael frigidly.*Heaven is vast. Michael and Adam take the scenic route.
Relationships: Michael & Adam Milligan, Michael/Adam Milligan
Series: anamnesis 'verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2155998
Comments: 16
Kudos: 120





	holy trinity

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after the events of _anamnesis_ , contains some flashbacks to the Cage/to season 15 events.

**the ice sheet**

"How come you never let Lucifer near me?" says Adam abruptly.

They're walking through a heaven that's a single flat plain of snow, under a silver-pale sky. Jade ice studs the ground nearby, crags of rippling turquoise that glow electric-blue where the sunlight catches them.

"You were my vessel," says Michael. "We have a duty to our vessels, even as we also benefit."

"Bullshit," says Adam. "I mean, I saw what Lucifer did to Sam." The memories still turn his stomach, even now.

"Well, nobody ever called Lucifer a paragon of responsibility," says Michael frigidly.

Adam lifts one of their shared hands and skims it along the nearest of the emerald juts of ice, feels the cold kiss his palm, feels Michael's interest, not so much in the sensation but in Adam's interest in the sensation.

"So that's all it was?" says Adam. "Duty? Angel-vessel etiquette?"

Michael is quiet, thinking. He's quiet for so long that Adam finally figures he won't respond at all. Michael retreats inward, sometimes, contracting into a distant corner of their shared skull and leaving Adam to pilot his body alone.

He never pulled away in the Cage, though. There was never an instant that he didn't have his wings up, the blazing coils of his true form a barrier between Adam and Lucifer, between Adam and the sear of the Cage bars.

*

**the new order**

The power that resides with them now, inherited from Chuck during the fateful chain reaction that rearranged the cosmic order of the universe, is a blazing, bright-hot thing. Adam imagines it's as if someone melted down a white dwarf and embedded it directly into their veins. Michael wants to tell him that this power is greater still, that its light once created countless stars. He doesn't, though. There's only so much the human mind can comprehend.

*

**the wood**

They're in a different heaven—an endless clearing in an autumn wood, the air thick with the sound of birdsong and nearby running water—by the time Michael finally answers.

"It was duty at first," he says. "And—guilt." He thinks about those first few years, or maybe they'd been decades, in the Cage—the searing awareness of how utterly he'd failed his father, how helpless he was to change anything about his situation. He'd promised paradise and victory to Adam, to the angels, to _God_ , and he'd meant it, and he had _failed_. He couldn't break through the bars—he couldn't kill Lucifer. But Adam—he could protect Adam. That small duty, he could perform.

"And later?" says Adam quietly. Around them, the yellow leaves are drifting to the ground in endless spirals.

 _Later_ , Michael thinks, is such a long time in Hell. Later had been another countless set of years, or maybe decades, or maybe centuries. Sam was long gone, reeled out by unseen hands to fates unknown. There was nothing in the Cage but darkness and razor edges and the rasp of Lucifer's fangs against Michael's wings. And then—Adam had pulled him into a memory, something inane and achingly vibrant, a picnic in a grassy meadow, his mother's laughter, the caress of a warm summer wind, the bright fizzing taste of a soda.

He doesn't think Adam realizes, even now, how close Michael had been to insanity. The monotony of it all, the isolation of it all, the pain and fear and loneliness. Lucifer had had millennia to adapt to the Cage; Michael had never known solitude, never been one instant apart from the melodic whisper of the Host.

For a few shameful, pathetic eternities he'd expected his father to save him. It's a thought that fills him with derision now. How utterly blind he'd been. He'd thought that surely _now_ God would return, that surely _now_ God would answer him, that surely he'd done enough, proven his devotion enough, suffered enough. But that hope dwindled away grain by grain until at last he didn't expect anything at all. Least of all compassion, least of all from the human in his charge.

He'd blinked under the memory's summer sunlight. Inhaled the smell of clover and raw earth. _What is this?_

_First picnic I remember with my mom._

_Why am I here?_

_Better than being alone out there, isn't it?_

There hadn't been God in the Cage, but there had been Adam. Adam, who could have curled in on himself and folded under the weight of misery, the way Michael was seriously considering doing. Adam, who unfurled instead, who told story after story, who brimmed with laughter on good days and thrummed with a sardonic, bitter despair on bad ones. Who hummed lullabies into the sulfurous darkness, called bullshit on what felt like Michael's every other sentence, let Michael curl his fingers deep into his own shoulders just to feel something solid. Whose sense memory was so sharp and full of clarity that it seemed he'd been preparing all his life to survive the eternity of this blighted prison.

"Later," says Michael now, to Adam, "I wanted to protect you, the way you were protecting me."

*

**the throne room**

There's some muttering, some shock and fear, when Michael first appears in Heaven's throne room, fresh from the confrontation with his father. Light is still settling into the capillaries of Adam's body, knitting itself through every cell of the vessel, every spark of Adam's soul, every mote of Michael's grace. Around them, the incorporeal machinery of Heaven sighs and begins to hum with renewed vigor, bolstered by their presence. It's this, more than anything, that seems to soothe the angels arrayed before them. The alarm fades slightly from Naomi's expression, replaced with a kind of guarded understanding.

"Where is he." She doesn't clarify; she doesn't need to.

"Gone."

Naomi roves her eyes over them—the nondescript olive-grey jacket, the windswept bangs, the hundred scarred wings flexing gently in their unseen dimensions. "So that means you are—"

"Here to help," said Michael firmly. He doesn't think there's any need to go into the cosmic details at the moment, and there's no way she doesn't recognize the aura radiating off of them, anyway.

It's the right answer, apparently: Naomi relaxes another fraction of an inch, nods. "We could use it," she says. "Brother."

*

**the cage**

"What would you do, if we got out?" Adam asks. They're slumped alone in the Cage, Lucifer having vanished without warning or explanation. It's quieter now, without the foment of Lucifer's casual malice; Adam hopes fervently that he's not coming back, even if it means the Devil's walking the earth freely. And, too, his disappearance has ignited a desperate spark in the embers of what might have once been called hope—Lucifer got out. So it _is_ possible. It is.

"Return to Heaven," says Michael promptly. "Find my father."

"Still?" Adam snorts. They don't need to speak out loud; they do, though, if only because the sound of their voices—just Adam's voice, really—is a bright blip in the darkness. "After he left you here to rot?"

"He'll need my help," Michael says confidently. They'd felt the seismic judder of the Cage when the Darkness escaped her own prison. Adam had watched Michael and Lucifer twitch with reflexive anticipation, like wolves scenting a kill. "Besides, _your_ brothers left you here, too."

"Half-brothers," Adam specifies for the hundredth time. "And who said I'd go looking for those assholes? I'll be riding shotgun up to Heaven, anyway, since you're so dead-set on playing hero for _your_ family."

"You don't need to remain my vessel, if we ever escape this place," says Michael. The old him wouldn't have offered. Wouldn't have spared a thought for the minutiae of Adam's life, any more than someone would an ant's. But he's spent an eternity sheltered in the memories of that life, an eternity shoulder to shoulder with the person who shaped and was shaped by that life. He can't discount it so easily now. "You've more than done your part—I won't ask more of you. You can resume life on Earth, in peace."

Adam thinks about his med school applications. He'd grown up with a mother who put people back together for a living, and that hadn't stopped a handful of ghouls from taking them both apart. He'd wanted to help people too, save people too, like she had, but that hadn't mattered to the monsters that ate him. It hadn't mattered to the angels who plucked him back from the grave so that he could offer himself up to be devoured, again.

He could go back, maybe. Try to pick up the pieces of his old life. He could go to med school and get a degree and spend the rest of his life trying to forget what he knows about the cruelty of the world's darkest corners and brightest armies. He could live out his whole life doing that, and it wouldn't be a fragment of the time he's spent in this cage, cradled above the burning metal by Michael's scarred wings.

"If I was your vessel, if we shared this body," he says, and pauses. Thinks about what he's saying, about what he's offering. What he stands to lose and to keep. "It wouldn't just be you calling the shots, controlling it all the time. There are things I want to do, too."

"That isn't...normally how it works," says Michael.

Adam barks a laugh. "We ever get out of here, you think either of us is ever going to be _normal_ again?"

He feels Michael tense at that, within and around him. He feels—because by now their emotions are rippling tides that share the same sea—Michael's flare of anger, and how it's subsumed by sorrow before it ever reaches the surface.

"There's nothing wrong with us," Michael whispers, and Adam knows he's lying but he doesn't call Michael on it. He lets Michael lie to himself, because it's dark and featureless and painful in this place in the lowest bowels of Hell and sometimes you just need to lie to yourself, just a little bit longer.

*

**the meadow**

"The question goes both ways, you know," says Michael. This heaven's a meadow; it reminds Adam of a place his mom used to take him, for picnics. There's a lump in his throat, as he studies the clover-studded glass, inhales the warm summer air. Michael picks up on it, responds with a ripple of his own melancholy—nostalgia for a sweeter, kinder past that they can never revisit.

"What do you mean?" says Adam, though he already knows.

"You let me stay. After we got out, you let me come back."

"You were hurt."

Michael kneels in the waving grass. He buries their hands in the flowers, in the warm earth. The light in them sings, a melody older than them both, formless and intricate. "Is that why?

"No." Michael would have healed, on his own. A human vessel had helped, but it hadn't been necessary.

"Then why?"

"I didn't want you to be alone." Adam had felt Michael's terror, when they were in the Cage. His despair and anger. He knows Michael had felt his, too. He thinks, but doesn't say, _and I didn't want to be alone, either_. "No one deserves to be alone."

"I would have returned to Heaven, to the angels—and you could have returned to your life, to other humans."

"We would still have been alone, though," says Adam. "Wouldn't we?"

Their fingers are full of clover blossoms, round and pale and cool against their palms.

"Yes," says Michael, softly. "We would have been."

The light in their shared body hums, soft and sweet and aching.

*

**the cemetery**

Squeezing through the pinprick rift in the Cage bars, clawing their way up to the surface—the journey rips Michael out of Adam, tears his wings to shreds, singes the tips of Adam's fingers coal-dark.

They resurface, flat on the grassy earth in Stull: one human wheezing for breath he suddenly needs for the first time in countless eternities, one tattered cacophony of light and sound that used to be God's most obedient son.

"Hey," Adam murmurs, urgent. He drags himself into a sitting position, reaches for Michael. Stretches his blackened fingers out toward the formless, shivering torrent.

I'M FINE, Michael manages. His true voice splinters the nearest headstone. Adam can understand him—Adam's always been able to understand him, from the first moment in the trap that was the Green Room, when Michael had arrived in a hurricane of wind and noise and glory, when Michael had made, in a voice like the sound of crashing water, that fatal offer that had doomed them both.

"It's alright," says Adam. He cradles an immeasurable coil of Michael's being in one hand. He shouldn't be able to—but he does. Michael's cool and intangible to the touch: he's intention given texture, a mountain stream translated to a wavelength. "You don't need to go."

Michael, blurring at the edges, an indistinct haze of agony on the ground, thinks about how Adam wanted to be a doctor. _Would_ have been a doctor, if the ugliness of the world hadn't intervened. Could have _still_ been a doctor, if Heaven hadn't had other plans. He flares the tatters of his wings, willing his grace to repair them faster. Wonders what's even left for him, in Heaven. God never came for him in Hell, and he's no longer fool enough to tell himself it'll be any different now.

"It's alright," says Adam again, gently. "You can stay. Come on."

Adam's voice—after the Cage, it's as familiar to Michael as the sound of the Host ever was. He's heard it hoarse and despairing, he's heard it thrumming with stifled laughter, he's heard it sharp and cutting, he's heard it lilting in song.

God will never answer him, Michael thinks, but maybe he's not alone, after all.

*

**the shore**

They're in a heaven that looks like a city park now. There aren't any people visible, but the sounds of laughter and chatter float indistinctly on the air; the light feels warm, comforting, busy in a way that's bustling but not harsh. 

"I haven't come this way in millennia," Michael says. Before the Cage, he hadn't had much interest in the day to day running of Heaven, the minutiae of its affairs; he'd been too preoccupied with the greater plan for the Apocalypse.

"Going for a hands-on approach?" says Adam dryly.

Michael had ignored the empty seat in Heaven's throne room. He'd given orders from beside that chair, once. It'd be his without question now, if he wanted it, but he's never been interested in titles.

Adam picks up on his thread of thought. "You don't want a crown?" Laughter runs under the question, a silvery-green undercurrent of mirth.

Michael frowns, taking the question seriously. "No. Heaven's had enough of rulers."

 _All this and he's still got a stick up his ass_ , Adam thinks, fond. "You know," he says, "when I said we should pick up some kind of little job, this wasn't what I had in mind."

It's Michael's turn to be amused. "You'd prefer we became a bartender? A construction worker? An accountant?"

"Probably be less pressure."

"Less pressure than wielding the light of all creation? Yes, I imagine so."

"Light of creation, huh?" echoes Adam. "Hey—do you think we could create a universe?"

"I don't know," says Michael honestly. "I think...perhaps not. My father was—a writer. In his hands, power was a tool for creation, for making, for forcing his will upon the story."

"And in our hands?"

"I don't know," says Michael again. He's quiet for a time. A bird flits by: a sparrow or a grackle, something small and adaptive. "What do we want it to be?"

"What is this—guidance counseling?"

"Maybe that's a good way to think about it. After all, you—you wanted to be a doctor, didn't you? You wanted to heal people. To help them. That's as good a wish as any."

"You wanted to help the world, too," says Adam. Abruptly, they exit the park; they're on a long stretch of shoreline now, the sand ink-dark under the starry sky. The water blooms with the teal glow of phosphorescent algae; each wave washes the beach with a slide of luminescent turquoise. In the distance, the glow stutters away into a ragged emptiness; this far from the throne, the energies that sustain the unseen machinery are flagging.

Michael snorts. "I wanted to _fix_ it. It wasn't particularly helpful."

"Yeah, well, I didn't say you had the best plan for it. Or that you didn't fuck up. But you wanted—you _wanted_ to help it. You wanted to protect it."

"For the wrong reasons." _I didn't care about the world, you know,_ Michael thinks. He watches as Adam crouches them in the sand, just beyond the reach of the water with its pale radiance. _Not really. I cared about my father, about doing what I thought was his will, about proving I was good enough for him to come back._ "I didn't love the world, not then, not before the Cage. Not before—not before I saw it the way you see it."

"Yeah. But, I dunno. Maybe you have the right ones now." Adam reaches out, swirls a hand through the dark water. The blue-green glow rolls outward from his fingertips, lights the sea up from shore to horizon. The heaven's throaty rumble settles, becomes a near-inaudible purr as energy smoothes its inner workings into good order.

*

**the reaper**

They hadn't understood, at first. They had already been— _becoming_ , even before that deserted street corner in Lebanon where everything had been on the line, where Michael's father had fought and snarled and cursed and died, as all beings die. But they hadn't realized it, hadn't understood what it meant.

For hours before that final confrontation, the light had been traveling its unseen way through the fabric of the universe to settle in their body, nesting slowly but surely within their consciousness. Adam certainly hadn't known what to make of it. Michael had recognized, in some distant way, the nature of the power—had felt the echo of his father's hand, the reverberation of creation juddering through his wings, through Adam's human bones. But he hadn't _understood_.

Even when the nephilim-child came to them, bearing traces of that power's mirror, a dark twin of it, Michael hadn't recognized it, hadn't grasped the meaning of it all. He'd thought it was Jack's lineage—Lucifer's darkness, lingering in his child's aura, a stamp of something wayward and wild.

It was Castiel who appeared finally, Death's ring winking from his hand like a frozen star, God's book open in his hands like it weighed nothing at all, and told them what the light was, what it signified. Told them that God had absorbed the Darkness and so written his own ending, that God could no longer be _god_ , and so the power Michael's father had once wielded would be passed down to him, even as the Darkness settled itself within the Jack's gangly frame, his fused soul-grace.

It was Castiel who looked at them with deep and aching compassion and told Adam that he would no longer be home only to himself and to Michael, but also to the power that had made the world. The power that would now unmake it, if they did not act quickly, if they could not accept who they were becoming.

They had understood, then.

*

**the door**

Adam pulls them to a halt. "This is it."

The plaque on the door reads: _Kate Milligan_.

"Guess you kept your promise, sort of," says Adam.

"I...didn't intend for it to take so long, truly," says Michael, contrition flickering lilac and grey under his words.

"Well, best laid plans of mice and—never mind, you didn't attend high school, you're not going to get that."

"You're nervous."

"I—of course I am. I haven't seen her since—since before—"

"There is nothing," says Michael, slowly and carefully and firmly, "wrong with you."

Adam looks away, then back at the door. He shoves his hands into their jacket pockets. "I don't like that she's here alone. We had other family, you know. Relatives. I had grandparents."

"Souls can't pass from heaven to heaven, generally. They stay in their individual—"

"Cells?"

Michael flinches, which means Adam does too, their shared body hunching slightly. It hadn't occurred to Michael at all, that the lattice structure of Heaven's individual eternities were prisons rather than paradises. He feels a pang of shame—he ought to know, by now, what it is to be trapped. "I—didn't think about it."

Adam's mouth quirks up, a faint smile. His soul flickers gold and mahogany, a soothing presence, a warm compassion. It's strange, he thinks, the kinds of things that take Michael aback, even after all those millennia alive. The kinds of things that angels don't consider, that Chuck hadn't considered, or hadn't cared about. "Well, good thing you've got me, then."

"We could open the barriers. It would take time, but we could restructure—give the souls free passage through all the heavens, create spaces for them to reside together, if they wish."

"Fixing?" says Adam, his grin tugging a little wider.

"Helping."

Adam's expression softens. "You know," he says, gently. "There's nothing wrong with you either."

The light inside them surges and hums; it likes this plan, this idea of mending. Protecting. It tangles its way deeper into their cell structure, coils in their fingertips, glows through the dull fabric of their jacket. Michael can feel his wings vibrating in response. Adam reaches out a hand for the door and under their skin sparks a human's soul, an archangel's grace, a god's power.

"Adam," says Michael, and the words catch in the throat that he shares, because he's glad he's not doing this alone. Glad that they weren't alone in the Cage, grateful for how they protected each other, sorry for how he's been hurt, for how he's hurt Adam. Glad that they share this power now instead of carrying it in solitude, glad for the light and burden of it, the way it thrums back and forth between them like a tide, like a song, like an intention.

"I know," says Adam. "Me too."

They open the door and walk through.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you all enjoyed this!! <3 I had a couple different coda/follow-up shorts that I wanted to write for anamnesis, and this was the first one. as always, hearing your thoughts and reactions gives me life <3


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